Profile Evaluation: 2018 MF/MFE Entry

[DavidW]

Hi, I'm a senior at a T30 state school in engineering (think PSU/NCSU/VTech). I'm looking to attend a top MF or MFE program next year and I'd love to hear some feedback on my chances at the following programs:

1) Princeton - Masters of Finance
2) Stanford - Masters of Mathematical & Computational Finance
3) MIT - Masters of Finance
4) Columbia - MFE
5) CMU - MSCF
6) NYU - Financial Mathematics

PROFILE:

• Age: 22
• Demographics: White Male, US Citizen
• Undergrad GPA: 3.95 (Computer Science Engineering)
• Research: 2 years in a statistics lab underneath well-known professor from Stanford/Harvard/MIT. One working publication in top journal in field as well as an honors research thesis.
• GRE: 1st score 332 (168V, 164Q); second score 330 (164V, 166Q)
• Internships: 1 technology internship at MS/JPM/GS, 2 internships at a F100 company (think P&G/GE/J&J)
• Graduate Courses: I have taken two graduate courses, one in high performance computing in C and another in Statistical Machine Learning

I realize it will be hard to get Princeton/MIT to bite without any front office experience and that my Quant score is low (166 best case). With that in mind, I was looking for some advice to help with application execution.

1) Will being a US Citizen give me an advantage?

2) Are any of these programs particularly friendly to a young applicants?

3) Is my first or second GRE better to use?

4) Any general advice on application execution?

Thanks for the help!

 

[IntoDarkness]

except for princeton, everybody else is cakewalk admission. mit is one of the easiest to get into

 

[DavidW]

Thanks man.

Can you explain "cakewalk admission"? Are they easy to get into in general, or do you mean easy to get into with my background?

Most of these programs appear to have a 7-15% acceptance rate which I would say is very competitive.